Hue, Too

“Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today,” at MOMA, is a smartly analytical show worth thinking about. Some of it is good to look at, too. The curator, Ann Temkin, tracks uses of color determined by “chance, readymade sources, or arbitrary systems” by forty-four contemporary painters, sculptors, photographers, and video and conceptual artists. Predominant are attitudes of ironic detachment that derive from Marcel Duchamp, whose rebuslike canvas of 1918, “Tu m’,” with its represented commercial color samples, begins the show. Is it outlandish—a reductio ad absurdum of the Duchampian, even—to regard color, the most emotionally affecting of visual phenomena, without emotion? It is. That’s the kick: all power to the hardboiled intellect. The idea’s repertoire of cleverness feels played out now—as well as undermined, even at full tilt, by the irrepressible talents of true colorists. Be they ever so cool, Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin, and Blinky Palermo can’t help stirring the heart, through the eye, with hues as cleanly gladdening as French horns in the morning. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the March 24, 2008, issue.